2017 Trends in Cloud Computing

The vitality of cloud computing to the contemporary enterprise is best measured in quantitative and qualitative terms. On the one hand, it is the cardinal enabler of a wealth of technologies and applications enumerated on multiple hands including cognitive computing, mobile, social, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, containers, and hybridized IT environments.

On the other, the sheer direness of these apps and technologies represent the foundation of the current—and future—data sphere, providing not only the most desirable means to interact with customers, but also to capitalize on datacentric culture as a whole.

In virtually all of these cases, the cloud either directly enables or significantly enhances the utility of the aforementioned facets of the data landscape so implicitly it would be easy to overlook the value it produces. A gander into the coming year reveals that individually these aspects of data management denote the most impactful trends to influence the cloud that supports them all, while hinting at the collective utility (and the greater value) of their deployment in tandem with one another.

Evolving Mobile
The relationship between the cloud and mobile computing, specifically as it is facilitated by the broadening influence of the IoT, is integral to the adoption rates of both of these technologies. The superfluity of Service Oriented Architecture, including most recently various artificial intelligence, industry-specific cloud, and Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) offerings, provisions the business/customer continuity required for mobile usage. In turn, the growing mobile movement is partly responsible for the various cloud types which, in the coming year, will follow a basic paradigm devolving from public clouds (AWS, Azure, etc), to private, hybrid and industry-specific ones. Additionally, third-party service providers have traditionally played a pivotal role in the implementation of mobile technologies which, according to Forrester, may very well transition to greater enterprise autonomy since, “Many organizations outsourced their mobile projects to third parties in an attempt to keep up with nimble, disruptive start-ups. Now that mobile is mission critical to their business, leading firms will bring mobile in-house and use design-thinking to drive success.” The design of in-house cloud-based architecture will likely adhere to the aforementioned model if organizations choose to eschew third party providers.

IoT’s Influence
The IoT typifies the mobile capacities the cloud provides so robustly that it’s responsible for shifting the typical model for cloud computing which, heretofore, was largely centralized in nature. The preceding years evinced the need for edge computing and decentralized models in which gadgets at the cloud’s edge conducted straightforward, basic analytic capabilities. The coming year will see the emergence of a synthesis of these two models largely due to the enduring nature of the need to “ aggregate across all of the data in a more data-intensive process,” MapR VP of Technology Strategy Crystal Valentine explained. “And that usually you would do on your back end platform. There is a small amount of computation that happens at the edge on the sensor device. But the requirements around massive storage, scale, and streaming capabilities are all responsibilities of a back end computational platform.”

Moreover, the use of containers is also gaining credence throughout the data sphere as a way to manage the incessant data streamed from the IoT. According to a Forbes article regarding Forrester’s 2017 IoT predictions: “IoT will be distributed across edge and cloud, boosted by AI and containers. IoT software will be distributed across edge devices, gateways, and cloud services. IoT solutions will be built on modern microservices and containers that work across this distributed architecture.” Despite the alteration in cloud architecture produced by the IoT’s ascending influence on the cloud in 2017, the IoT will likely become the most visible manifestation of the cloud—particularly as defined by the amount of data processed and utilized by it. With the influx of the wearables market, the healthcare industry is becoming one of the chief drivers for this market which has traversed beyond the industrial internet to also include telecoms, retail, and oil and gas industries.

Virtual IT
The architecture shifts facilitated by the cloud transcend specific applications involving the IoT, to represent a basic transition in the way general IT functions are facilitated. In fact, the distributed nature of the cloud and its varying manifestations will directly correlate to IT as it is deployed near the end of the decade. According to an overview of 2017 IDC predictions: “By 2020, 67% of enterprise infrastructure and software will be for cloud-based offerings. What clouds are and what they can do will change, IDC predicts: The cloud will be distributed with 60% of IT done off-premise and 85% by multi-cloud by 2018…by 2020 it will be where trusted and secured IT lives.” The distributed nature of IT certainly corroborates the viewpoint that third party cloud service providers will continue to affect organizational use of the cloud in the coming years, as SOA for IaaS and PaaS perhaps overtakes those for specific SaaS models.

Industry-Specific Clouds
The trend towards industry-specific clouds will increase its assertiveness in the coming year as further testament to the ongoing credence of decentralized, specialized approaches affecting this medium. Forrester’s 2017 predictions for cloud computing urge organizations to “Take a fresh look at your regional and industry-specific cloud providers—specialization is afoot” while auguring “SaaS will move away from one-size-fits-all to regional and industry solutions.” Industry-purpose clouds abound in numerous verticals, including most saliently healthcare, insurance, finance, and others. This trend will expand substantially in the coming 12 months as according to the aforementioned IDC predictions overview, “75% of F500 companies will be suppliers of digital services through Industry Collaborative Clouds. 90% of Industry Collaborative Clouds will partner with a Cloud mega-platform provider.”

Interest in industry-specific clouds is largely attributed to the boons associated with having an entire cloud dedicated to the needs of a particular vertical. Such specificity targets the results that are most relevant to organizations operating in that space, and delivers them in the most widely used format with a rapidity equal to the speed of business processes throughout the industry. Such clouds are also attended by innate domain expertise that becomes readily accessible to organizations as well. Subsequently, they are suggestive of the degree of specialization which is further transforming the nature of the cloud in general.

Cognitive Computing Capabilities
Perhaps one of the more surprising trends affecting the adoption rates of the cloud and the diversity of forms it takes for the enterprise is the impact of cognitive computing capabilities. Options for machine learning, deep learning, NLP, and other manifestations of artificial intelligence are by no means new to the cloud. However, IDC’s predictions evince “that the cloud is “democratizing adoption” of AI functionality. By performing cognitive services for the enterprise—including honing inordinately large and messy data training sets for deep learning and machine learning algorithms, augmented by RDF graph technologies and their intrinsic machine intelligence—and simply offering the results of these processes to organizations, these advanced data management capabilities are more accessible than ever. Subsequently, this trend may result in a lowering of prices for cognitive solutions, especially since the cloud enables organizations to only pay for the services they actually use.

An Integral Medium
The data landscape is rapidly evolving at an unprecedented pace. It is simultaneously becoming more specialized and more democratized, enabling organizations to accomplish more in ways that suit their specific use cases better than older techniques previously could. With the surplus of big data generated by the IoT and mobile applications, (enhanced by AI-augmented analytics) and delivered expediently via containers in industry-specific clouds facilitated in hybridized IT settings, the cloud sits at the pivotal nexus point of all of these manifestations in a unique way. It is the very medium which provides all of these technologies and applications to interact with one another; it’s the single necessity provisioning the footprint to take data management as a whole forward into the coming decade.

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